


understanding

by lulla_lunekjaer



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, basically Tris wakes up from nightmares about killing the slaves and Briar hugs her?, idk when you put it like that it sounds weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 22:23:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6095884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Briar doesn't understand, but he loves her, and that's enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	understanding

**Author's Note:**

> these smol children bring me life but also make me so sad??? what even  
>  
> 
> can you tell I've had no sleep the past week

Sandry slept well at night, provided there was a light when she woke.

Daja had become used to sleeping while the bed beneath her wasn’t rolling with the waves, but she would always wake up when a bell signaled time for the next watch.

Briar had always been a light sleeper. Years of living on the streets will do that to a kid. 

Tris didn’t sleep anymore. Maybe an hour here, two hours there, but never through the night. At first she told them it was just Shriek, that she had to be awake to feed the starling in the middle of the night. But then Shriek started sleeping through the night, and she told them it was habit. 

In the end, she was glad it was Briar. Sandry would want to talk about things, and Daja wasn’t the sort you could cry in front of and then pretend to be fine the next day. 

She thought she had gotten better at muffling her screams.

“Coppercurls?” He peers into her room. “Tris?”

Shaking, Tris looks up at him.

“Tris?”

“Briar?” Her eyes are full, of emotion, of tears, of pain.

He crosses the room, slowly, so as not to startle her, and takes her trembling hands in his own. 

“I killed them, Briar, I killed them and they’re burning and drowning and screaming and I killed them.”

“Tris, you saved Winding Circle. You saved Sandry, and Daja, and Lark and Rosethorn, and Nico.” 

She’s sobbing and getting Briar’s shirt wet, but he doesn’t care. He hugs her, carefully at first, and she grabs at him like she’s the one drowning and there’s a million things he could say, all of them wrong-

_ They would have died in a normal battle anyway _

_ It’s our fault as much as yours _

_ You paid your debt with the healing afterwards _

_ I understand  _ (he doesn’t, he knows he doesn’t) (he thinks he never will) (he’s wrong) 

(he doesn’t understand, but he loves her, and that’s enough.)

-so he doesn’t say anything at all.

If Rosethorn goes to wake Briar up for some early-morning weeding and finds him and Tris in a tangled mess of blankets and limbs and hair and one particularly persistent vine that had been growing right outside Tris’s window, she never says anything.


End file.
